FILM

FILM; But Is the World Ready for More of 'Caligula?'

By TED LOOS

Published: September 19, 1999

Correction Appended

THIS month, the movie that became infamous for going too far is going even further -- about 12 minutes further, according to its producer, Bob Guccione. ''Caligula,'' called by Newsweek ''a two-and-one-half hour cavalcade of depravity,'' is now running nearly two-and-three-quarters hours.

''Values have shifted dramatically,'' said Mr. Guccione, explaining why he wants to return to the screen a movie that inspired comments like ''remarkably repulsive'' from the film critic of The New York Times. ''I think it will be less controversial today.''

Critics who reviewed this $17-million historo-pornographic epic in 1980 were unanimous in their disgust; patrons even in shock-proof New York recounted that the theater in which it was showing reeked of vomit, and Mr. Guccione returned to his day job as publisher of Penthouse magazine and never made a movie again.

Nonetheless, he sees ''Caligula'' (which opened Friday) as ''a cinematic icon''; and he is calling the re-release ''a director's cut.''

Gore Vidal, who wrote the film's first screenplay, isn't so sure. ''I wonder how there can be a 'director's cut' of a film that credits no one as director?'' Mr. Vidal said.

Indeed, no one is credited as screenwriter, either. When he learned about the explicit sex scenes, Mr. Vidal demanded to have his name removed from the title; the film was to have been called ''Gore Vidal's Caligula.'' In the end, the credits said the film had merely been ''adapted from an original screenplay'' by the writer.

''I had to go to some expense to get my name out,'' Mr. Vidal wrote in an E-mail from his home in Ravello, Italy.

Tinto Brass, the original director, didn't last either, leaving Mr. Guccione and Giancarlo Lui, who served as Mr. Guccione's assistant director, responsible for ''additional scenes,'' while Mr. Brass was credited with ''principal photography.''

Even without the defections and recriminations, it would never have made much of a date movie. The Roman Emperor Caligula, who was assassinated after less than four years of misrule, is assumed to have been mad: his best-known act was making his horse consul. In the movie, he interrupts an incestuous affair with his sister to kill his grandfather, Tiberius. Once on the throne, he governs by means of an elaborate decapitation machine, essentially a weed-whacker for the heads of people conveniently buried up to their necks in the ground. For relaxation, he rapes both a bride and groom on their wedding day.

BUT the depredations of a first-century tyrant are not the movie's chief concern. ''The film's action,'' wrote Vincent Canby in his Times review, ''is entirely in its orgies, which are exhausting and solemn.'' Spiked with violence and populated with Penthouse pets -- one of whom later sued Mr. Guccione for sexual harrassment and won $4 million in damages -- the ''sex-and-violence tableaux,'' Mr. Canby said, left him ''with the feeling that everybody in the world has more endurance.''

Mr. Guccione presumably agrees that the movie doesn't need any amplification in this department. The footage added for the re-release, he said, is mostly dramatic rather than sexual. That no doubt pleases the classy actors whose performances are glimpsed in between the orgies: Malcolm McDowell as Caligula, Helen Mirren as his wife, Peter O'Toole as Tiberius and John Gielgud as one of Caligula's advisers.

''I never thought of it as pornography,'' said Mr. Guccione, who sold tickets for the movie at the then-exorbitant price of $7.50. ''It was to be the first of a trilogy of films I had in mind to illustrate the axiom that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.''

''Caligula'' grossed $21 million in its initial release and, according to Mr. Guccione, worked its way to $30 million through video sales. Mark Borde, a president of Legacy Releasing, the Los Angeles company that is distributing the film, expects it to do well in re-release. ''People remember it,'' he said. ''It's release-proof. You could even go up against 'Star Wars.' The audience for this movie will come anyway.''

Though the augmented, Dolby-ized prints are being released as the 20th anniversary edition, Mr. Guccione has jumped the gun a bit, since the original was released in 1980. So yet another milestone accrues to the film believed to be the most expensive ever to contain explicit sex footage: it will go down in history as the first film to be re-released in a 19th-anniversary producer's cut.

Photos: Malcolm McDowell, as the emperor, addresses Romans in ''Caligula,'' which also starred Helen Mirren and John Gielgud. Dancing with the emperor's horse in ''Caligula.'' (Photographs from Penthouse Films International)

Ted Loos's most recent article for Arts and Leisure was about Cinefest, a film festival in upstate New York.

Correction: October 3, 1999, Sunday Because of an editing error, an article on Sept. 19 about the re-release of the movie ''Caligula'' misstated the type and amount of damages awarded in a sexual harassment suit brought by a cast member against the film's producer, Bob Guccione. In the original case (Thoreson v. Penthouse International Ltd.), the plaintiff won $4 million in punitive damages, as stated in the article, and $60,000 in compensatory damages. But when the case was heard on appeal, the punitive damages were ruled unavailable in sex-discrimination cases. The article also misstated the name of the company releasing the film. It is Independent Artists, not Legacy Releasing.